'Walking Dead' Season 4 May Introduce a Character Even Worse Than the Governor

If you watched the last season of The Walking Dead, you know the Governor is pretty much the worst villain Rick and the survivors have encountered so far. If you've read the comic books, however, you know there's an even badder baddie out there, and his name is Negan.

In the comics, Negan is a spectacularly violent and evil villain. I won't spoil the books for you, but I will tell you that Negan has a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire he names Lucille, and in issue 100, he uses Lucille in a scene that's so shocking, I literally had to close the pages and do some deep breathing because holy crap.

The question is, will we be seeing Negan on the small screen any time soon? The answer, according to creator Robert Kirkman, is "probably."

(Potential spoilers ahead!)

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There was a lot of talk about the Governor before his character was introduced on the show, and whether or not the series would depict him as darkly as the comics did. So far, the show hasn't gone quite so far into the Governor's brutal wickedness, but I think they did a pretty good job of slowly revealing what a creepy and formidable enemy he is.

That seems par for the course with how The Walking Dead as a TV show compares to the comics -- it generally sticks to the overall storyline, but feels free to wander around and do things differently along the way. So it seems reasonable to assume that when or if we do meet Negan, he may not be exactly as he was originally written. Similarly, we may meet him sooner than later, since timelines on the TV show aren't matching up with the comics.

Creator/executive producer Robert Kirkman and new showrunner Scott Gimple were recently asked about whether they'd consider adding Negan to the show, and here's what they said:

That's definitely a real temptation when you are adapting a show. It's sometimes a struggle because I feel like there are very cool things that are waiting in the wings in the comics that we could do earlier in the show. But those things only work the way they work because of everything that came before them. We have to build up to them properly. Negan isn't going to be as cool if we don't set up this, this, this, and this. We do want to do Negan, and it seems likes everyone on the show does want to do Negan, but we are going to have to do all these other things first. -- Kirkman

Reading the book now and reading Negan as a character, I'm like, ‘Damn, there's so much to do before we get to him!’ One of my favorite issues with him recently was the Carl/Negan issue. I think it'd be such an amazing episode of TV, but we have a lot to do before we get there. -- Gimple

Again, I'm not going to delve into specific spoilers, but I'm very interested to see how the Negan story unravels on the show. In the comics, Negan does TERRIBLE things to the survivors, but he takes a creepy interest in Carl. Which makes you wonder what Carl's ultimate fate is, both on the show and in the comics. Can he escape his own darkness? Or is he perhaps destined to become the worst villain of all?

At any rate, I personally doubt we'll be meeting Negan in season 4, because it sounds like there are already plenty of reasons for our survivors to be fearing for their lives. But season 5, maybe? If so, get ready for a potential can't-unsee-it scene involving a beloved character ... and a baseball bat.

Do you think the Walking Dead creators will bring another major villain into season 4?